In the past decade, the pace of deregulation of the telecommunications markets around the world has accelerated rapidly. Federal telecommunications liberalization legislation in the United States, the European Community's mandate that its member nations liberalize their telecommunications markets by January 1998, and the World Trade Commission's agreement on freeing trade in telecommunication's markets world wide have combined to result in a period of unprecedented growth in the global telecommunications market. New carriers are being created to compete against the old monopolies, established monopolies and carriers are merging and forming joint ventures to create global giants, and fringe market players (resellers and call back operators) are expanding their product lines and extending into new markets.
As carriers build new networks and extend existing networks to new markets, they are encountering many technological challenges which they did not face when they operated only in a single, domestic, market. One of the most significant challenges is that of managing the myriad of communications network protocols which are used in different markets. Telecom operators must interface with a variety of customer Private Branch eXchange (PBX) equipment, and must also interconnect with other operators for access and egress. Today, there are between 35 to 50 variants of base protocols. The ability of the new entrants to support customer access, local, long distance and international protocols often determines their ability to compete successfully.
Communications protocols are the "languages" that allow telecommunication equipment (switches, routers, customer premise equipment, etc.) to communicate with each other. It is essential for a new carrier to be able to support the protocols of its customers, to provide access for their existing Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), and the other networks with which it must interconnect, via switch to switch interconnections. Moreover, the creation of more advanced services, such as Intelligent Networking, requires that communication's protocols contain increasingly detailed information and the migration towards ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Method) network backbones requires the capability to support voice network protocols through data networks.
The technical solutions to this problem, that are available today, have not sufficiently met the requirements of the network operators. Traditionally, network service providers have supported protocols directly on the network switches. This was an adequate solution when the carriers operated only in a single market, but as they expand, their switches do not support the new protocols and the development time and cost for adding all required protocols to their switches are prohibitive. Voice protocol conversion solutions available in the past have been managed on a one-to-one basis which result in small, hardware based solutions. These solutions are inflexible, have limited scalability, are unstable, and do not operate as truly integrated parts of the carrier's network.
One example of the problems with the prior art is in a connection between a protocol used by Deutsche Telekom AG and another protocol, such as G1. When a party using the protocol of Deutsche Telekom AG generated a call signal and the other protocol generated a busy signal, the Deutsche Telekom AG threw away the busy signal and continued to generate the ring signal to the calling party. Rather than change their protocol, Deutsche Telekom AG used a mechanical solution of monitoring the tone.
Another example of a problem with conventional equipment arises when large multinational corporations use a first protocol, such as DPNSS, to provide a "call hold" between the company's PBX's using leased trunk lines. However, these trunks cannot be extended across national boundaries due to high expense, national regulations, and incompatible service providers. The telecom service provider used by the company determines that each country supports a similar, but not exact, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) public facility signaling system. Both systems, for example, are compliant with ITU Q.931, but use two network-dependent fields in a different manner. The requirements for connectability then become:
1. Convert a DPNSS "call hold" message sequence to an ISDN message sequence for Country A; PA1 2. Convert ISDN messages in Country A format to ISDN messages in country B format; and PA1 3. Convert ISDN messages in Country B format to DPNSS for deliver to the remote PBX.
Consequently, a convoluted, multi-conversion process must be implemented.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a universal, simplified, but easily configurable protocol converter which can be used by many different protocol systems; that can be easily configured for new protocols and changes to existing protocols. This need has existed for a long time and has not been solved by the existing equipment.